On the 20th November 2013 I was invited by MMC Zavoda K6/4 to give a talk on the subject of e-books. I shared my perspective from the point of view of an independent bookseller. Here’s a video recording of the result:

There are some interesting bits. I share my analysis of the subject. And, yes, I depart into the wide and dangerous forests of talking abut subsidies, vertical distribution, interests of capital, and the virtues of sharing. I even dare to speculate about possible reincarnation of Behemot.

The talk is in Slovene. To be precise – in a very relaxed, colloquial, almost my own private Slovene. Language purists beware!

If you prefer reading, here is an abridged and heavily edited transcript. Down from 5.000+ words to less than 3.500. And it’s still neither grammatically nor politically correct. Read at your own risk.

Thanks to Maja and Dare for inviting me.
Thanks to Alenka Pirman for recommending me.

Dear friends, thank you! Thank you for your last purchases. Thank you for stopping by for a glass of wine. Thank you for your blog posts, gifts, newspaper articles, emails, tweets and comments. Thank you!

I’m not entirely sure when I first walked into Behemot as it wasn’t a particularly pleasing experience.

My friend Rok Pregelj wrote a beautiful essay about an “enchanting and weird” place.

When bands came to play in Ljubljana, I’d take them to Behemot to get a book and Bi-ko-fe to get coffee. When someone hosted Couchsurfers, I’d take them to Behemot. It became one of those oases that inspired hope that business could indeed be done fairly. People were generally excited about its fragile existence.

He underlines all important aspects of my approach to business, art, and life in general. And, yes:

About a year ago we decided to include a selection of books by Slovene publishers. Basically, what we did was.. I mean, what Tadeja did.. frankly, I lack the knowledge.. she basically did the same as we always do with books in English: pick the most interesting, the most important and the most beautiful books; narrow the endless stream of printed material into a hand-picked microuniverse.

This was one year ago. I hesitate to go on telling you this, as anyone who understands anything about book-business will naturally conclude that I am a moron. Well, our statistics is: in one year we sold 76 books by Slovene publishers.

For an independent bookseller, this is about a number of books that you want to sell in a day. Or, if you are really small, like we used to be, it’s a number of books you might want to sell in a week. Definitely not in a year.

Domestic book-business was always a Sphinx to me. Uninviting, posing questions that, with my knowledge and experience, I am unable to answer. In a way, what we did was a litmus paper test. The results are so far off the scale that I still refuse to think about it and rather remain silently puzzled.